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[Jefe]

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Deterrence (Part 1 and Part 2)

One of the best articles I have ever read. Read Deterrence (Part 1 and Part 2) at the site. Very long, but worthwhile.

This is an excerpt:

…Finally, and most tellingly, Senator Kerry says that Iraq is “a long, long way from the fight on terror.”
Senator, you might choose to read some history: it might broaden your perspective. The last time this country was attacked, it was by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, whose capitol city was Tokyo.
The first land battle the US Army fought was at Kasserine Pass. Kasserine Pass, Senator, is in Tunisia. Tunisia is in Africa. Africa is a long, long way from Japan.
Tunisia did not attack the United States, Senator Kerry. Tunisia, in fact, was a far, far more innocent battlefield than Iraq, which had spent the preceding decade, and then some, committing overt acts of war against British and American aircraft flying missions to enforce UN mandates.
US troops fought in Tunisia – and they fought badly; infinitely worse than they do in Iraq – because people of vision and courage and great intelligence perceived that this was the first, best front against an enemy that straddled the entire globe. We did not begin our war by launching an armada of landing craft filled with Marines on a suicide mission from Midway to Tokyo. We did not send fleets of transports to get shot down over Berlin carrying fifty divisions of paratroopers.
We attacked in Tunisia because it was the soft underbelly of a powerful enemy. There is a word for this type of action, Senator Kerry, and that word is “foothold.” It is a place where the enemy is weak. It is a place we can capture, fortify, defend and launch further attacks from. As Tunisia, so Africa. As Africa, so Italy. As Italy, so Germany.
We were not attacked by the natives of the Marianas, or the Solomans, or the Marshall islands, and yet these innocent people died along with our troops. It was part of a strategy for victory, Senator. I know you understand the term ‘strategy.’ It’s the other term that seems to me to stick in your craw as I examine your entire career.
Here’s something you might want to read up on aboard the campaign jet: bright people have done studies on what the operational limits of a terror cell are. It’s actually kind of… biological. See, as a terror cell grows in members, it gains not only mutually-reinforcing enthusiasm, but capability. However, the bigger the cell, the less secure it becomes.
Zarqawi’s cells having been fighting us from the day Saddam’s statue fell. So I ask you, Senator: if there were no terrorists in Iraq, where did these organized units come from? Did they parachute in? Saddam’s Fedayeen are not and did not behave as a defeated military unit, but as an organized, cell-based structure. Where did they come from? And poor, unlamented Abu Nidal? And how many others?